To be or not to be... a lectionary preacher?

OK, so for a long time I've had beef with the lectionary. I've tried to express this to my friends in the past, and have never got too exercised about it (at least, I don't think I have), but the lectionary over the last couple of weeks has really got my goat.

So this is the problem. Last Sunday (22 July 2012) the lectionary gospel was Mark 6.30-34, 53-56. I have a problem with the lectionary filleting texts at the best of times, but this was a particularly egregious example. Mark 6.30-34 is the introduction to the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand (note, the miracle itself is rather clumsily excised from the lectionary for the day). After the feeding miracle, Jesus makes his disciples get into the boat so he can pray by himself. The next morning, Jesus walks towards the disciples who are struggling on the lake. Jesus gets into the boat, the storm stops and they pass safely to Ganessaret, which is where we pick up the reading with 6.53-56 with Jesus healing the sick. So to make the reading shorter the lectionary compilers (a) rip out the really interesting stuff (feeding miracle and walking on water) and make it a reading just about Jesus' compassion and healing people. (b) splice two lake journeys into one. Journey one (6.32) leads to the feeding of the five thousand. Journey two (6.45) leads to the walking on the water and only then to the healings at Ganessaret. It might sound like I am being pedantic, but this does real violence to the story! The upshot of all this was that I decided to preach on Ephesians 2 instead.

This week matters are made much, much worse. For those who don't know, this year of the three year lectionary cycle (year B) is 'The Year of Mark'. You would be forgiven for not knowing this because, at every available opportunity the lectionary compilers ditch Mark and go for John. Admittedly John doesn't have a year of his own (which in itself makes the basic premise of the lectionary problematic), but why on earth would the lectionary compilers choose to substitute a Johanine for a Markan text this week? The text from John which they choose is John 6.1-21, which is... the feeding of the five thousand! They pick the account of a miracle which every evangelist, including Mark, records and to add insult to injury, this is part of the material they removed from the previous week's reading from Mark! Come on! Presumably they think John tells it better. I can kind of forgive (though I don't understand or condone) the wholesale abandonment of Mark's gospel over the easter season. But the last couple of weeks take the biscuit. The lectionary really makes a dog's dinner of biblical narrative.

So that is my particular beef with the lectionary at the moment. But there are also more systemic problems:

• The lectionary is inherently lop-sided. The format prescribes three readings. One from a collection of 39 books, another from a collection of 23 books, and a third from a collection of 4 books. It should be pretty obvious how this is naturally going to lead to a lack of balance. Is it any wonder that there are so many latter day marcionites in the church given that we give 30% of reading time to over 70% (by word count) of the bible? This is particularly glaring when the preacher has got it in their head that one should only really ever preach from the gospel reading (something I hear rather too often). I don't know where this idea came from. I'm pretty sure that it doesn't lead to a happy place.

• Because the lectionary is lop-sided in the way described above, it has to leave out large swathes of the Old Testament, just take a look at the big master lectionary for the CofE (for this comparison I am referring to the 'Semi-Continuous' track one). Leviticus, Numbers, Judges, Song of Songs, Lamentations, Joel, Jonah, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai and Malachi all appear only once each in the three year lectionary cycle. 1&2 Chronicles, Ezra, Ecclesiasties, Daniel, Obadiah, Nahum and Zechariah don't appear at all. All in all, Isaiah does the best out of all Old Testament writings, making an appearance on 31 Sundays. Genesis is next with 20 appearances, followed by Jeremiah with 14 and Exodus with 13. Every other book appears less than ten times over the three year cycle. I just find this breathtaking. If, as I suspect, large numbers of Christians are only really reading the Bible in the context of the Sunday liturgy, they are getting a tiny fraction of the Old Testament simply because the lectionary arbitrarily allocated 30% of reading time to it. I've heard people extolling the virtues of the lectionary because it takes you through the bible in three years... it doesn't.

• Yes, there is the gospel related 'track two' as an option for the Old Testament reading for Sundays after Pentecost, but this just plays with a solution to the problem. Of the underrepresented books, in year A, Amos, Zechariah, Jonah, Micah and Zephaniah get a single look in, the bulk of the readings are from Isaiah. In year B, Job appears twice as does Numbers, Joshua gets one reading Daniel gets his only two appearances and Amos is read another couple of times. In year C, Ecclesiastes gets another reading, as do Habakkuk and Malachi, Amos gets another two readings. The bulk of the gospel related Old Testament readings come from already well represented books. Even so, to get through the thematic and semi-continuous tracks turns the three year lectionary into a six year lectionary. The imbalance still remains. 

• The readings are often completely unrelated. Trying to discern a common theme within the readings for a given Sunday more often than not leads to a major headache. Besides, if you do manage to hold the readings together with chewing gum and rubber bands, don't you kind of end up preaching the thoughts of the lectionary compilers? The response made by some preachers is to not preach on any of the texts, opting to preach on their favourite topic, you know, the one they have preached on a thousand times before. The response which most sane preachers make to this is to just preach one of the texts. The obvious question which this approach poses is, 'why on earth do we have the other two readings!?' If they are in no way related to each other, and consequently in no way related to the theme of the liturgy (and we should all try and discern a theme in good liturgy planning, right?) then why have them? Don't they just clutter the liturgy. Why not just have one?

My fear is that for those whose reading of scripture is almost entirely on a Sunday through the lectionary, the bible becomes at best a collection of wise vignettes, at worst a confusing jumble of incoherent stories. In fact the worst possible result of this fruit salad approach to bible reading is that scripture becomes completely irrelevant both to the liturgy and to the people of God. Don't get me wrong, In principle I love the idea of the whole church, as much as possible, reading the bible together. A common calendar is a great way to achieve this. But, seriously, is this our best attempt? Rant over.

The Mystery of Yourselves

I was asked to write a short article on the eucharist/spirituality/embodiment for a local christian spirituality magazine. Here is my attempt.

We talk about Christ’s body a great deal in church. ‘The church is the body of Christ’ we say. At Christmas we talk about the divine person of God the Son, assuming to himself a whole and complete (body and soul) human nature. The word became flesh – the bodiless was embodied. In holy week we talk about the psychological, emotional and physical anguish and ultimately the death which the embodied God underwent on behalf of sinful humanity. And on Easter day, we tell of the glorious body, revivified in the most extraordinary way, giving life and hope to all. Our talk of ‘the body of Christ’ of course, is not limited to the great festivals of the church year; every week we talk endlessly about Christ’s body and blood in the eucharist. However you look at it, christianity is and always has been a religion which is obsessed, in a good way, with bodies. So why is it that, when we speak of ‘spirituality’ (itself a concept which doesn’t sit easily within the christian interest in embodiment), our thinking and practice in relation to the body takes a radical turn for the worse? We start talking about ‘detachment’, silence and the god within, in ways which sounds more platonic than christian.

Now I’m not one to underplay, or for that matter to undervalue the significance of platonism (particularly neoplatonism) on the development of Christian theology. Some of the most creative and enduring attempts at proclaiming the Christian gospel have come about through an innovative appropriation of some platonic ideas. There are, however, limits beyond which such assimilation begins to erode basic christian belief, and therefore should be resisted.

The negative effects of platonic anti-materialism on christianity aren’t merely theoretical; they are deeply rooted in the psyche of most parishes, and they are most clearly seen when ‘church’ (however that is conceived) is turned into a form of escape from the ‘world’. How many times have you walked into a church building and seen a notice advising you to leave the world behind and enter into the beautiful, spiritual peace which the building affords? I am not surprised that many christians tend to think of spirituality as a kind of escapism; the way we ‘perform’ the liturgy in churches is largely responsible for this. Despite the best efforts of the liturgical movement, worship in most churches remains something which is done on behalf of the people, a sacred moment which we observe and to a certain extent are drawn into, but which has scant reference or relevance to the lives we live outside of the church building, and relatively little effect on them. Too often we go to church on Sunday to leave the world behind us, to get a glimpse of a world beyond, and then to go back home to wait for next weeks spiritual shot in the arm.

It is a great pity that for many christians, religious escapism finds its apex in the celebration of the eucharist. Yves Congar once noted that the Roman church (and I think it would be fair to make a similar observation of the Church of England, particularly in its more Roman instantiations) has attempted over many centuries to re-create within the eucharistic liturgy a ritual somewhat alike that performed by the Levitical priesthood [Congar, Y., ‘Where Does “Sacred” Fit into a Christian Worldview’ At the Heart of Christian Worship, Liturgical Press, 2010]. We make a certain class of people (the priests) ‘holy’ and give them special titles and clothes to wear; the priests perform a mysterious rite in which they conjure the presence of God out of material elements, the supernatural annihilating the natural; we make certain buildings ‘sacred spaces’, and whisper pious words in them; we even make certain parts of those special buildings more sacred than others. Like the Levitical code, the church is constantly trying to isolate the pure from the impure, the sacred from the profane.

In the same article Congar notes how the revolutionary teaching of Jesus removed the sacred/profane distinction by making all things sacred: so all days are to be Sabbaths to the Lord, on which good is done, people are healed and the oppressed are liberated; all places (not just Jerusalem or Mount Gerazim) are sacred, and worthy sites for worship. Jesus resisted every attempt to localise holiness in shrines by declaring all things holy. To use Rob Bell’s phrase, ‘everything is spiritual’. For a follower of Jesus, ‘sanctity’ or ‘spirituality’ cannot be achieved by withdrawal from the world. To remain true to the Genius of its founder Christianity should never be a religion where certain things or places are made holier than others; it must be a religion where the entirety of life is understood as holy and, therefore, is a fitting offering to the God of all creation.

In the story the eucharist tells, and in the manner of its telling we should hear a constant reminder of the holiness of all things. In the eucharist we proclaim the holiness of the ordinary, bread and wine, symbols of our lives presented to God as a living sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. As St Augustine said,

"If you are the body of Christ and His members, it is the mystery of yourselves that is laid upon the altar. It is the mystery of yourselves that you receive. It is to what you are that you say ‘Amen’. For you will hear ‘The body of Christ’, and you will reply ‘Amen’" (Sermon 272)

The eucharist rejoices in materiality and sees it as a fitting vehicle for the divine. The eucharist tells us that ‘spirituality’ is something that shouldn’t be confined to the ‘holy moments’ we manufacture to escape from a threatening world. You could almost say that the radical gospel proclaimed in the eucharist calls into question the entire category of ‘spirituality’ as something distinct from the rest of life.

Revelation 3.1-6: Hear What what the Spirit says to the church

A sermon preached at Exeter College, Oxford 6 May 2012.

“At Helms Gate, before the mouth of the Deep, there was a heel of rock thrust outward by the   

northern cliff. There upon it’s spur stood high walls of ancient stone, and within them was a lofty 

tower. Men said that in far-off days of the glory of Gondor the sea kings had built here this fastness 

with the hands of giants. The Hornburg it was called, for a trumpet sounded upon the tower echoed    

in the Deep behind, as if armies long-forgotten were issuing to war from the caves beneath the hills.    

A wall, too, the men of old had made from the Hornburg to the southern cliff, barring the entrance to 

the gorge. Beneath it, by a wide culvert the Deeping-stream passed out.”

The Hornburg at Helm’s Deep was impregnable. Everyone knew it. Helm Hammerhand made the fastness famous, and according to Theoden, it would “never fall while men defended it”. There would be no safer place for the people of Rohan to face the onslought of Saruman’s Uruk Hai hordes. Theodan trusted the history of Helm’s Deep so much that he was oblivious to the culvert.

“Even as they spoke there came a blare of trumpets. Then there was a crash and a flash of flame and 

smoke. The waters of the Deeping-stream poured out hissing and foaming: they were choked no 

longer, a gaping hole was blasted in the wall, a host of dark shapes poured in. ‘The devilry of 

Saruman!’ cried Aragorn. ‘They have crept in the culvert again, while we talked, and they have lit 

the fire of Orthanc beneath our feet.”

Confidence in former glory never exempts us from vigilance. Had Theoden realised this, the Deeping wall might not have been breached. Had the city of Sardis realised this, they wouldn’t have had their supposedly invincible fortress with walls rising seamlessly from a thousand foot precipice scaled by enemy troops who opened the city gates to the armies of Cyrus. And had the church of Sardis realised this, they may not have had this rather scathing letter written to them.

The church of Sardis looked alive, it had a good reputation in the city, their religion was respectable, they faced no outward preassure like the other churches you read of in the second and third chapters of Revelation. We don’t read about any heresy. No specifics of immoral behaviour. No persecution, only good will and friendliness from their fellow Sardisians. To the casual observer, the church of Sardis was a picture of good health. 

Throughout the history of the Christianity, theologians have tried to define what the essential observable characteristics of the true church are: Being in communion with a particular bishop; Apostolic Succession; The true preaching of the word, rightly administering the sacraments and the faithful exercise of discipline. All of these have been advanced as observable, objective indicators of being part of the ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic church’. We play the same sort of games today. I’m sure you’ve heard people judge a church on the basis of its music, or whether they prophecy and speak in tongues. You may have heard people judge whether a minister is a ‘proper’ priest on the basis of the clothes she wears, which direction she faces when presiding at the eucharist or whether she holds her hands at the correct angle during the eucharistic prayer. I don’t doubt that all of these things are important, at least to some people. But when we consider the words of the risen Christ to the church of Sardis, we don’t find a criticism of the lack of reverence and order in worship, or a failure to use the charismatic gifts, or even a failure in doctrinal standards.

The church of Sardis had a reputation for being alive, but really only had the vestiges of living religion. There was a conflict between the impression they made and the spirit at their heart. The Sardisian church gives us the archetype of nominal christianity. Exterior correctness and respectability, but inside, the church was dying fast.

It is easy to see how The Church of England is particularly susceptible to the threat of nominal religion. We are the established church. We have a dignified, ancient and rich tradition of worship. Our theologians have a reputation for being subtle, nuanced and intellectually rigorous. Our bishops are part of the national legislature. The Church of England epitomizes respectability. If Professor Dawkins were to go to a Christmas Carol service at any church, I’m sure it would be CofE… probably an Oxford college Chapel. The Christianity of the establishment is particularly prone to death from respectability, to mistaking heritage and reputation for health, but is by no means unique in this. We aren’t the only church which has this culvert in the Deeping wall. Any church which prides itself on its spiritual inheritance or its present achievements  whilst simultaneously failing to pay attention to its inner life runs the same risk. 

The nineteenth-century Danish priest and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was well aware of this and wrote about it at length. You can read his thoughts in The Attack Upon Christendom. He looked at his own church, where the crowd and the congregation, the state and the church had become almost indistinguishable and was filled with rage. He felt that the only correct response was to attack ‘Christendom’ for what it had done to the church. It had robbed her of her vitality, of her inward life, of the sense of holy scandal that he felt the Christian gospel ought elicit from the world. “The human race”, he writes, “in the course of time has taken the liberty of softening and softening Christianity until at last we have contrived to make it exactly the opposite of what it is in the New Testament” (Fatherland  39). To some, Kierkegaard seemed to be anti-church, but he was only motivated by love for the church. He he wasn’t particularly interested in changing the specifics of church practice, rather, he wanted to change the spirit in which the church practiced its religion. All the observable features of the church were sound, but there was something missing, something lackluster about its practice of religion.

But there was still hope for Sardis. There were some for whom faith was still alive and not a matter of mere formality. Whilst something remained, there was hope that this something could be strengthened. Whilst there is still life there is time for the church to wake up, still time for it to repent. The letter to the Church of Sardis opens with a reminder of the Church’s true nature – it is like a light held in the had of Christ. The church is sustained by Jesus Christ, the living one, our life depends on him. Perhaps above all, the urgent need is to listen and discern. This is the advice given in each of the seven letters we read in the first part of the book of Revelation: “Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.” The church always must be a listening community, a community which deliberately listens for what the Spirit says, and deliberately places itself under the Lord’s training. The call the church receives in every generation is to reform, not so much by tinkering with the externals of church life, even though the externals will need reformation, but by recovering its inner vitality.

1 Corinthians 11.17–34: Discerning the Body

About a month ago, Caroline and I went on holiday to Sorrento. We had a wonderful time and, rather predictably, we spent much our holiday working our way around Roman archaeological sites. We did the obvious trips to Pompei and Herculaneum, and spent hours wandering around their streets. But we also went to some less well known places: the Villa di Poppaea in Oplontis, rumoured to have been the house of Nero’s infamous second wife, Poppaea Sabina. We went to a large farmhouse in the middle of a housing estate in Boscoreal, and we went to two beautiful villas in Stabia, which were a lot further away from the train station than the guide book had led us to believe! As we wandered round the remarkably preserved ruins of homes, destroyed when Vesuvius erupted in 79AD, you could almost feel what life would have been like to live in a Roman villa in the first century.

Now why on earth am I telling you about my holiday this year? I’m telling you because it is to these domestic settings that we are transported when we read Paul’s account of how the Corinthian church celebrated the Eucharist. It’s important to remember that in the very earliest days of the church, there were no church buildings in which people worshipped. All christians would have worshipped in the private homes of the wealthier members of the church. Another thing to remember is that, whilst we are used to receiving the eucharist as a tiny amount of bread (which looks and tastes nothing like bread) and a tiny sip of wine, in the first century the eucharist would have taken place within a dinner party. It would have been a complete meal.

Now when you remember these two things, the domestic setting and the dinner party, it becomes easier to understand why Paul was so unhappy with what was happening in the eucharist at the Corinthian Churches. The homes of the wealthy Corinthian christians would have had a dining room called a triclinium in which about nine to twelve people could have comfortably reclined around a table. It seems the wealthy Corinthian christians were inviting their well-off friends to sit and eat with them in the triclinium, where they were eating lots of sumptuous food and drinking lots of wine. But the poorer people, who weren’t as popular with the wealthy, were being left to eat in the atrium, a large entrance lobby which could seat about thirty to forty people. The rich were gorging themselves, while the poor were getting a few scraps of food and drink, scarcely enough to stave off their hunger. Imagine something a bit like the divide between first and second class on a transatlantic flight. In one: champagne, smoked salmon and other delicacies, something resmbling a bed rather than a chair, and a foot massage (you can tell I’ve never travelled first class). In the other, a soggy sandwich and a warm glass of orange juice and three inches of leg room, if you’re lucky. The poor Christians were being treated as the scum of the earth, as second class, by people who were supposed to be their brothers and sisters.

Paul’s problem with the Corinthian eucharist wasn’t that they weren’t getting the ritual or the liturgy right, or that they didn’t believe in the ‘real presence’. Yes, Paul does say that ‘all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgement on themselves’ (v. 29), but this cannot mean ‘perceiving the real presence of Jesus in the bread and wine’, that would run against everything Paul has been saying to this point. He’s been talking about how christians treat each other, not about eucharistic theology. For Paul, discerning the body means recognising the church as the body of christ (as he often calls it, cf. 1Cor. 10.16–17, 12.12–31). His problem was that by humiliating the poorer members of the community, the richer members had both failed to understand what the eucharist was really all about, and had desecrated Christ’s body, the church. All the liturgy and ritual, and reverencing the real presence in the world can’t make up for this basic failure! 

So what is the eucharist all about? Paul reminds them by retelling the story of the Last supper, so that they could see through the current situation back to foundation of the eucharist, to the Lord of the Supper himself. Paul reminds them of the magnitude of the gift which Jesus gives: a new covenant, a new community, created at the greatest cost by Christ’s death for us. The old order was one in which people were divided, where the walls separating one group from another stood firm and high. But in the community of the new covenant, the walls have been torn down, ‘Jews and gentiles, slaves and free’ (12.13) are all part of the same body. So sharing the common meal is for Paul a kind of acted parable, declaring the unity and equality of all the members Christ’s body, the church. ‘Although we are many’, he says earlier in 1 Corinthians ‘we are one body, because we all share one bread’ (1Cor. 10.17). Just as baptism makes us part of the one body of Christ, the eucharist sustains us in the unity of that one body.

So, as we finish, what can we learn from the problems Paul addresses here? We don’t celebrate the Lord’s Supper like this any more, in someone’s home at a dinner party, and it doesn’t feel like there are class ranks in this church. So can we learn anything? Well, it would be a terrible sermon if we couldn’t, so I’m going to say, ‘yes we can’.

If the eucharist is about sustaining the unity of the body of Christ – unity with Jesus, the churches head, and unity between us, the members of the body –  if the eucharist broadcasts to the world the radical equality of God’s new community, in which the barriers between human beings have been torn down, we should really make sure that we don’t start erecting those barriers again! Whatever background someone comes from, the church should be the place where all stand as equals in God’s family, united in the life of Christ which we share. Absolutely no one should be excluded. Perhaps the question we should ask ourselves regularly is this: ‘who are the people we would rather didn’t come to our eucharist? Who are the people we would like to keep away?’ The noisy? The smelly? The ignorant? The bigoted? The liberals? The Trendies? The ‘happy-clappies’? The ‘moldy oldies’? Do we only want a church where we find ‘people like us’? Or do we want one that welcomes everyone who God is calling? The new covenant was established by the infinitely wealthy one, pouring out his own life for his lowly, grubby, ignorant, bigoted, loudmouthed, unpleasant, dearly beloved friends. If that is what we’re really remembering in the eucharist, what should our church look like? If the all-holy one invites us to his table, who are we to exclude people from ours?

This is my body

I'm writing a magazine article on the relationship between the eucharist and our embodiment. This is quite long, but if anyone feels like reading it and also feels moved to comment, I would love to hear what you have to say and maybe discuss it a bit here. This comes from Austin Farrer's 'Said or Sung'. It is the transcript of an address delivered at the Eucharistic Congress at the Albert Hall in 1958 – That might provide some needed context!

A speaker to an unfamiliar audience has to take a risk. He has to assume that his interest in the matter he discusses is shared by his hearers. In the present case my anxiety on this head is not great. For surely you feel the curiosity I feel when I consider that moment in which our Saviour said, 'This is my body.' How could Peter, John and the rest have understood him at all? They could not, anyhow, understand him altogether; why, the Holy Ghost came down presently at Pentecost for this very purpose, to give them, after the event, the understanding they had lacked; and to lead them into all truth, about the sacraments as well as about other divine things. But even at that moment, sitting at the Supper, they must have understood something. It was not our Saviour's way to talk with his friends in a language they could make nothing of; and least of all, in the night before he died. They cannot have been quite bewildered to hear him call the bread his body; even though his own living body sat there amongst them, holding the bread in his bodily hands, and calling it his body with a bodily tongue; even though in the next moment, Jesus ate a crumb of what he had called his body, putting his body into his body. That, you might think, was utterly confusing for his companions; and I do not deny that it was mysterious; but it was not so bewildering for them as it would be for us, and this is the reason - they had certain ways of thinking about their daily food, which have become less familiar nowadays.

I will ask you, then, to think for a moment about this old-world attitude to bread. Not that there is really anything old-world, or difficult, or unnatural about it, once we get round to thinking of it. We, surely, can say two things about our food, both equally true. First, food is a sort of fuel, which keeps us running; we turn it into warmth and energy; we burn it up in living; we can say, for short, that food is life. But in the second place, food is body-building; it is not merely consumed, or used by the body, it becomes the body. No doubt a small portion of matter came to us from the bodies of our mothers, but however much or little it was, it has long ago been replace. Every particle of what we now are has come to us from our diet; unless it has come from sunlight, or from the air. But roughly or picturesquely speaking, our food is our body. Food is body, then, and food is life, both equally and not more than the other; both ways of speaking are in the Bible; both, indeed, are applied to the Sacrament. the sixth chapter of S. John tells us that the flesh of the Son of Man nourishes us for eternal life; and it is familiar enough with us to think of the Sacrament as life, or sustenance. The other thought is not so familiar nowadays – I mean, the thought that food is body. But this is the way we need to think, if we are to understand what happened at the Supper.

If a Jew blessed his food - that is, if he said grace for it – and added, before eating it, 'This is my body,' his friends would not have been altogether surprised. They would have wondered, if anything, why he bothered to say it. It was his body, of course – his body to be; not actually his body, as anyone could see; he would need to digest it first. But it was already consecrated to be his body, because he had first said grace for it; and if he liked to call it his body, well, perhaps he could. 'Blessed be thou, O Lord, King of the World, who bringest bread out of the earth' was the old Jewish grace. When the Jew had blessed God in such words for his bread, he reckoned he had hallowed it for its proper use. Bread that is blessed is to eaten, it is to be the eater's body. God has given it for that purpose. 

Grace before meat is an important Christian action; by saying grace we acknowledge a divine gift, and no less a gift than the renewal of our bodily being, bestowed on us by the hand that made us. Every meal renews the wonder of our creation, all eating is a natural sacrament. In our morning prayers, we take our life again afresh from the hands of God, to use as he has chosen. And in our daily meals we receive our very existence, our physical being, the stuff of ourselves from God, to use according to his will. So Christ taught his disciples to look to heaven for their daily bread, and to receive it at their Father's hands; even though man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. What Jesus taught, he practiced, and the supreme example of grace-before-meals is that of Jesus at the Supper. He takes the food from his Father's hand, to be his body; he rises from the table, he goes and does with that body what his Father desires. and what is that? He offers it on the cross for his Father's honour, and for our salvation.

I have been talking as though Jesus, at the Supper, had said grace for himself alone. And he did say grace for himself; but not for himself alone. He said grace for the company; and to make the fact more evident, it was his duty to crumble the loaf for which grace had been said, and pass the pieces round; everyone present must eat a crumb of the one blessed bread. Now if the blessed bread of a lonely eater is his body, the blessed bread of a whole company is their body, the body of them all; by eating the one loaf, they have their common existence from a common stock.

Think of the family of Christian children, sitting round the table. They are all, in Bible language, the issue of their parents' loins; but besides this, they have constantly, year in and year out, built their bodies up from the one food their father earned them, and their mother prepared for them. So we Christians are all one family at the table of our Heavenly Father. S. Paul does not think he is saying anything remarkable to the Corinthians, but quite a matter of course, when he says: Since the loaf is one, we many partakers are one body; for we all partake the one loaf. He is indeed expressing an idea ages and ages older than the Christian sacrament – the immemorial bond of common food. Those who build their bodies from one loaf are one body; just as those who draw their being from common parents are one blood.

Jesus, then, said grace for the company. But if so, why did not he say 'This is the body of us all' when he had blessed the bread? Why did he say, 'This is my body, which is for you'? The point is not merely that they share a body, but that the body which they share is his. Once again, the ideas of that ancient world would help the disciples to understand him. If friends feasted together who were equals, the bond of bread accepted equally – they were all one body, all members one of another, to quote S. Paul again. But suppose an ordinary citizen went to dine with a great man, a prince, a king? Then he could say: 'This is the royal food, made ready to become the king's body; it has been blessed to be his flesh. And I, a common man, am privileged to share it, to be one body with my lord.' It was in this way the people of God thought of the temple-sacrifices, where the Lord of the banquet was divine. They were privileged to come to the table of God Almighty. they could not think that he actually ate any part of the feast; that would be gross, heathenish and absurd. But they did think that God, of his loving-kindness, had appointed the altar to act as his deputy, or representative. God was graciously pleased to receive what the altar flames devoured, though he had no need of such offerings; and so, in eating the rest of the victim, his people had a sort of table-fellowship with their creator. 'Look at old Israel,' says S. paul. 'Do not those who eat the sacrifices come into communion with the altar?' But that God would push that altar aside, and take its place, that God would come to them in human flesh, to sit at their table, and give them a share in his body – there was a mercy, and a condescension of God, for which they dared not hope. Yet here, at the Supper, was Jesus saying: 'This is my body, which is for you.'

He says it now, rather than at any previous feast, because now he has to leave them; and before he goes, he wishes to join them with himself by the covenant of bread. Ah, but do the disciples understand the nature of the bond? Jesus has blessed his food, to be the body he will offer in his sacrifice; do they know that they are committed to membership of such a body as that? A body flogged, broken, crucified – see, he crumbles the loaf before their eyes. Do they perceive the new meaning in the ancient custom, the breaking of the bread? Are they willing to be parts of such a body, are they willing that his body, with its sacrificial destiny, should be theirs? The disciples were not yet fully willing, but they came to be, and so we all must; for if we do not want to be given and surrendered to God, why touch religion at all? By partaking of the sacrificial body, we are to be made capable of sacrifice, taken up, as we are, into the sacrificial being of Christ.

Let us return to our starting point, and see what we have accomplished. We wanted to explain how the disciples could have seen any meaning in the words, 'This is my body.' And we have seen that there was plenty there for them to understand. Messiah, their heavenly king, has blessed the bread, to be his body. He is going to die for them, but he first gives them a share in his body, by the fellowship of bread.

I wonder, now, what you think about this line of interpretation. If I were sitting where you sit, and hearing such ideas for the first time, what should I think? 'This Oxford man,' I should say, 'has overdone it. He has explained too much. He set out to explain the disciples' thoughts, but has ended up explaining away the Master's action. it seems there was nothing in it, after all Christ was saying grace in the Jewish way, and pointing a Jewish moral about the grace he said. Everything was as natural as could be.' That is the sort of objection I should feel, and that is the sort of objection which, I dare say, you do feel. What are we to say in reply?

'Everything was as natural as could be.' Suppose it was, what is there in that to disturb us? Who expects Jesus to be unnatural? What more natural, more human, more sweet, that Jesus in Mary's lap, or sucking at her breast? But he is no less Son of God for that; Son of God, conceived of the Holy Ghost, and not by natural generation. All Jesus' acts are natural and kind; nothing could be more human, yet there is a fathomless depth in them, a meaning inexhaustible and divine. For he who does these things is not man only, but God. it is so with the Super. The words of Jesus are human, and they are divine; natural, but all the more supernatural for their naturalness.

When any pious Jew blesses his food – or when any of us blesses his – we may consecrate it to be our body, we cannot make it our body. Only God does that, the God, that is, of nature. Our creator, whose will gave us this bodily being, brings to pass by process of nature the transformation  of bread into body, after we have eaten the bread. If any of us calls his food his body, he means his 'body-to-be,' anticipating the action of God, which will make it so. It is otherwise when Christ blesses bread, and declares it his body; for then the voice that speaks is the Word that made the world. It is the Creator who blesses, when Christ blesses bread. Creation, we remember, is itself a blessing. As God makes each thing, we read, he sees it to be good; he blesses his living creatures, that they might increase and multiply. We are what we are by the blessing of God; we join our wills with his when we bless him for making us what we are. At the Summer, the Eternal Son joins his will with the Eternal Father, blessing him who gives the bread to be his body. The blessing is creative and almighty. He says it is his body, and it is his body, by appointment of the will no creature can resist. It is his body for every sacramental purpose, for communion and sacrifice, on the altar and in the tabernacle, on the palms and in the mouths of sinful men.

What is it, then? the age-old bond of common bread, and the custom of grace before meat, are the natural foundations on which Christ has built; and a scene of touching human simplicity, of jewish household piety, becomes the sacramental mystery of our redemption. When we feed on this bread, we do not merely stock our bodies with the same stuff as Jesus used for stocking his. The bread is his body now, it is on him we feed; and this is it that unites us. If, in our Christian being, you and I are one, it is because we have nothing as Christians but what we draw from Christ. Each of us has little human knowledge about most of the others who sit with us in this hall; but we are all one body, being partakers of that one bread.

(Austin Farrer, Said or Sung, 125–131)

To Will as God Wills

Some more words from Traherne:

O the nobility of Divine Friendship! Are not all His treasures yours, and yours His? Is not your very Soul and Body His: is not His life and felicity yours: is not His desire yours? Is not His will yours? And if His will be yours, the accomplishment of it is yours, and the end of all is your perfection. You are infinitely rich as He is: being pleased in everything as He is. And if His will be yours, yours is His. For you will what He willeth, which is to be truly wise and good and holy. And when you delight in the same reasons that moved Him to will, you will know it. He willed the Creation, not only that He might Appear but Be: wherein is seated the mystery of the eternal generation of His Son. Do you will as He did, and you shall be glorious as He. He willed the happiness of men and angels not only that He might appear, but be good and wise and glorious. And He willed it with such an infinite desire, that He is infinitely good: infinitely good in Himself, and infinitely blessed in them. Do you will the happiness of men and angels as He did, and you shall be good and infinitely blessed as He is. All their happiness shall be your happiness as it is His. He willed the glory of all ages, and the government and welfare of all kingdoms , and the felicity also of the highest Cherubims. Do you extend your Will like Him and you shall be great as He is , and concerned and happy in all these. He willed the redemption of mankind, and therefore is His son Jesus Christ an infinite treasure. Unless you will it too, He will be no treasure to you. Verily you ought to will these things so ardently that God Himself should be therefore  your joy because He willed them. Your will ought to be united to His in all places of His dominion. Were you not born to have communion with Him? And that cannot be without this heavenly union. Which when it is what it ought is Divine and infinite. You are God's joy for willing what He willeth. He loves to see you good and blessed. And will not you love to see Him good? Verily, if ever you would enjoy God you must enjoy His goodness: All His goodness to all His hosts in Heaven and Earth. And when you do so, you are the universal heir of God and all things. God is yours and the whole world. You are His, and you are all; or in all, and with all.

(Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, first Century number 53)

The New Song

For those who have reached (or are about to reach) the end of term, I thought you might appreciate this, from Austin Farrer.

We notice that late in the summer term noises and confused cries, for which no reasonable cause can be assigned, are apt to trouble the midnight air. A friend of mine who lives in a College off Radcliffe Square lay awake against his will, hearing without much pleasure 'the shout of them that triumph, the song of them that feast'. Before he made another attempt at composing himself to sleep, he thought he would refresh himself with a taste of the coolness outside; he dressed, and walked into the square. The sound of riot had suddenly stopped; it was quite dark, and perfectly still; and a pair of nightingales in Exeter College garden were singing their hearts out. His own heart turned over in his breast. the performance, indeed was not new; we have heard nightingales before; and nightingales have been singing the same song since long before mankind got the wit to enjoy them. Yet thought there is nothing fresh for them to sing, they sing freshly, their singing is their life, they are not putting on a stale record. And it is a stale ear in my human head that cannot feel the freshness, or yield to the magic of it.

'Sing unto the Lord a new song',  says the old Psalmist, for God's most strange love is insulted by a stale adoration. And yet the newness will not be in the song, since there is nothing new to sing; but in the singers, to whom God may perpetually grant a newness of heart, in voicing his praise. Our tired imaginations see eternal sameness in the chanting of heavenly spirits; and yet, says St John, they sing a new song in honour of a wonder that will never grow old. For as God in the cradle is a wonder on earth, which angels celebrate, and shepherds adore; so man on the celestial throne is a marvel in heaven, which those heavenly eyes can never cease to drink in with amazement.

Salvation is all or nothing. God's other works are subject to his hand; his human creatures, to whom he has given a particle of his own spirit, he saves by uniting with his own everlastingness. There is no comfortable half-way house for us to abide in, midway suspended between God and the created world. It is the mercy of God to make us sharers in his own sovereign life, and this he does by uniquely and personally uniting the manhood of Jesus to his own being, and then associating us with that manhood of Christ. The heart and focus of humanity is there with God; and when we lift up our hearts, and put them with the Lord, we recollect what we are, and where we truly belong. Kings have always been credited, whether superstitiously or in mere ceremony, with a shadow of godhead. The substance is Christ's alone: his is the royal will by which we can live, for it is one with the will that made us; his purpose is the purpose of our being. The wonder of it never stales.

And so it is always a new song in heaven, with which we on earth can join, that the Lamb was slain, and has redeemed us to God by his blood out of every kindred and tongue, every people and nation, and made us unto our God kings and priests, by our association with that royal right, and with that redeeming sacrifice.

(Farrer, The Brink of Mystery, 107-108)

Ben Witherington III - Women and the Ministry Part Two

Women and the Ministry Part Two

Here is the second part!

Ben Witherington III - Women in Ministry Part One

Women in Ministry Part One

Watched these this morning. I think Ben Witherington argues really persuasively (as persuasively as you can in seven minutes) for reading the trajectories of the New Testament: In the world of the New Testament Church "... everything was geared to a male centered kind of world. So when you're looking at the New Testament and what it says about women and their roles... what you need to look for is not primarily affirmations that women were part of a man's world... what you need to look for is trajectories of change and difference."

After this I'll also post the second video, which deals more specifically with the ministry of women in the New Testament.

What a world would this be, were everything beloved as it ought to be!

Some wise words from Thomas Traherne, the seventeenth century Anglican priest and metaphysical poet.

Suppose a river, or a drop of water, an apple or a sand, an ear of wheat or a herb: God knoweth infinite excellencies in it more than we: He seeth how it relateth to angels and men; how it proceedeth from the most perfect Lover to the most perfectly Beloved; how it representeth all His attributes; how it conduceth in its place by the best of means to the best of ends: and for this cause it cannot be beloved too much. God the Author and God the End is to be beloved in it; Angels and Men are to be beloved in it; and it is highly to be esteemed for all their sakes. O what a treasure is every sand when truly understood! Who can love anything that God has made too much? His infinite goodness and wisdom and power are in it. What a world would this be, were everything beloved as it ought to be!
(Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, Second Century, number 67)

1 Corinthians 3.1–17 – Real Church: Real Spirituality

We have preaching a series on 1 Corinthians at St Nic's at the moment. Here is my offering on the first seventeen verses of chapter three.

As I was working on my Sermon, I realised that what we have in these readings from 1 Corinthians is a description of the real church. Not the church we fantasize about, not the church that we would like to see, but the church as it is, with all its messiness and fighting and trouble. What strikes me about the letter’s Paul wrote to the Corinthian church is that, despite all its problems, you could not deny that this church was alive. These Christians, as Paul says in our reading, are God’s temple, with his spirit living in them. Isn’t that strange, the most vibrant church in the New Testament, the church you could best describe as ‘alive’, is a church which is so full of problems. Perhaps this shouldn't surprise me, life isn’t smooth, and living things always face problems. You don’t, after all, get any trouble from the residents of a grave yard. Real, living Churches always face difficulties, it’s part of the growing pains of the children of God. And the church of Corinth was no stranger to this. We don’t see a perfect church in this letter, but we do see a real church, a church whose problems we are familiar with. And in this letter we also find an Apostle who, like a mother, wants to feed and nurture these young christians, to help them grow up into maturity in Jesus.

And so we come to this morning’s reading, which I think could be given the title, ‘Real Church: Real Spirituality’. Notice the first words of the reading, “And so, brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ” (1 Corinthians 3.1). The Corinthian Christians were very proud of their Spirituality. In fact they were quite critical of Paul for not being spiritual enough (2 Corinthians 12)! They were quite convinced that they were the real deal when it came to matters of the Spirit and that everyone else was, well, the opposite,  fleshly. But Paul immediately turns their own elitist way of thinking about spirituality back on them. They think they are Spiritually mature, but in reality they are babies, so immature that they can scarcely be called spiritual. Paul wasn’t known for pulling his punches, but that is just down right insulting, isn’t it? How can Paul say that about the poor Corinthians? You might even start to feel sorry for them.

The answer is that Paul knows a secret about the spiritual life. He knows that true spirituality bears fruit: Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, he says in another of his letters (Galatians 5.22–23). But when he looks at the Corinthian church he sees the complete opposite. He sees jealousy and quarreling. They are Christians and of course every Christian has been given the gift of the Spirit by Christ. But the Corinthians were behaving as though they hadn’t received Christ’s gift. The fruit of their lives was telling a different story to the words that were coming from their mouths.

What makes matters more serious is that their ‘jealousy and quarreling’ wasn’t about trivial things. I get quite jealous of people who have the must have clergy gadget, the ipad, but this isn’t the kind of jealousy Paul has in mid. They weren’t jealous about each others cars or houses or jobs. In fact, it’s probably better to translate jealousy as ‘zeal’. The Corinthians were religiously zealous. They were keen on promoting their strongly held religious opinions, and it was this which caused their quarrels. They were quarreling over religion, and don’t we know the pain of that! There were factions in the congregation, and they each had their favourite religious teacher: Paul, Apollos, Peter, and then there were the really conceited ones who claimed to only have Christ as their teacher. And division into religious parties wasn’t just fanboyishness, they were asking really serious theological questions: How should we grasp God’s wisdom? How can we avoid worshipping idols? How should the Spirit be manifested in worship? These are important questions to ask… and these were the sorts of questions which were taring the Corinthian church apart. As long as their zeal for their favourite teacher or their theological hobbyhorse were causing quarreling and disunity, they were living as though they had never known the spirit, as though they had never become Christians.

So what does it mean for the church to be spiritual? According to Paul it means to live without rivalry and disunity and quarreling. Paul says that the way to have real spirituality, the way to be spiritually mature is to stop fighting. The real measure of spiritual maturity is seen in the unity and peace of the Christian community.

I don’t think it’s too hard to see spiritual elitism in our own lives. We might get ‘into’ a particular spiritual writer, I’m a fan of Eugene Peterson, but it could be John Main, or Richard Rohr, or Ignatius of Loyola or St Francis of Assissi or Thomas Aquinas or Junlian of Norwich or whoever. Perhaps we start to think that this person we find inspiring has all the answers and that nothing else quite hits the mark. Or I might have a particular way of praying which I think is really neat. So why should you bother with anything else? Right? After all anyone who doesn’t pray how I pray, or worship as I worship is really missing out! You’d have to be foolish to not want to do things differently! It might be that I think I am the one with the correct doctrine or that I am a proper catholic or whatever. But whatever standards we set up to prove that we are the real deal, the genuineness of my spirituality will be seen in one thing and one thing alone: do I live in love and peace with my brothers and sisters?

So how do we live in unity and peace in the church? The first thing Paul does is to remind us what we already are in God’s eyes. The church is God’s garden (3.5–9), God’s building (3.10–15) and God’s temple (3.16–17). The church is God’s prized possession. He couldn’t love the church (the real church, as it is with all its messiness) more. We don’t need to engage in spiritual one-upmanship or elitism, trying to prove that we are better than the rest, because God already loves us all just as we are.  The second thing he does is to remind us that the church belongs to God, and not to us. We are given tasks to do in the life of the church: we are to sow and to water; we are to put brick on brick. But ultimately, the garden, the building and the temple belong to God. ‘Paul planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth’ (3.6). How do we move beyond divisions in the church? By realising that we are all working to the same end. By realising that we are co-workers and that final responsibility for growth doesn’t lie with us, but with the God we serve.

Despite our differences of emphasis, despite the different ways feel God’s presence with us, despite the external differences of practice between this church and other churches, one thing can truly be said, we are all co-workers, planters and waterers of God’s Garden, brick layers in God’s building. True spiritual maturity isn’t evidenced by our rigorous spiritual practices, or by our detailed knowledge of spiritual writers. It isn’t found in our orthodoxy, or in the correctness of our particular form of worship. True spiritual maturity is found the church living at peace, it is found in serving God and serving one another.

John 15.9–17 – On Being God's Friends

Preached at Guildford United Reformed Church, Sunday, May 20 2012

One of the greatest crimes of which popular culture is guilty is the emaciation of love. Hollywood, Mills and Boon and a thousand thousand love songs have reduced love to the merely romantic; to an obsession with emotional or erotic hungers being satiated. Given the evacuation of meaning and depth from our understanding of love, Jesus’ command to love one another as he has loved us might seem strange. We know it must be important. We may even suspect that it has something to do with self-sacrifice, but beyond that we tend to be quite clueless. Our conception of love tends to be obsessed our needs being met, love for many has indeed become what Antoin de la Salle once called egoisme a deux, a quid pro quo for the satisfying of our need to be adored.

So in a world where the very idea of love has become bland, the question this text provokes is, what precisely is the love which ought to characterise the Christian community? How does Jesus want us to love one another? 

The first thing that we notice about this love is that we have an example to follow, we are to love in the manner in which we have been loved by the Lord. God is Love, John tells us elsewhere, but by this he does not mean that God is a seething mass of inner emotional turmoil. God’s love doesn’t emotionally respond in an all too human manner to the loveliness of the beloved. God doesn’t love us because he needs to love us. God is eternally happy in himself. He is the transcendent perfection from which all creaturely love flows. God is pre-eminently love. The love with which God loves us, therefore, depends neither on a deficiency in the lover which needs to be compensated for, nor a worthiness in the beloved which compels adoration. We are loved simply because God chooses in his goodness to do so. God loves us because he wills to love us.

And so the love we are to show is to correspond, albeit in an imperfect manner, to God’s love. Our love for one another is not, in this sense primarily emotional. When we are presented with the imperative to love one another we are not being commanded to whip ourselves into an emotional frenzy. The type of love that should characterise the Christian community is not a love that depends on feeling love for the other. Jesus isn’t commanding us to get doe eyed with our neighbour. It is a decisive and active love. A love which responds to the other out of the sheer goodness of loving, out of our desire to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. And so, just as our love is not to be the result of an unmet need in us, which would make it little more than a form of self love, neither is it based on the loveliness of the beloved. It may be, after all, that we are called to love many people that ordinarily we would sooner shun than welcome as brothers and sisters. But love we must, impartially and bountifully. We are to love one another as we have been loved.

The second thing we realise about love from Jesus’ words to his disciples, is that his love for them is special kind of love. Not the love of a master to a favoured slave, but the love of a friend, of an equal. To be sure, this isn’t chummy friendship, or a facebook friendship, plentiful but often meaningless. We’re to obey his commands, and that isn’t something that I generally expect of my friends, at least, not those who I expect to hang onto! But it is still a friendship of equals. It is a friendship which sees the perfect love and goodness of the one who makes us his friends, and would no sooner disobey his loving commands than desert him as a friend. After all, Jesus too obeys his Father, and we don’t believe that this makes him the  Father’s subordinate. A great spiritual writer from the twelfth century, Richard of St Victor, when writing of the love between the persons of the Holy Trinity, tells us that the love of the Trinity must be a love between equals, because true love can never exist between a superior and subordinate. There would always be fear in the relationship, which we are told perfect love casts out. But how then, could God ever truly love us, if you can only ever truly love an equal? If ever there were an equality gap, it’s that between God and his creatures. A great philosopher once told a story which might help: There was a king who fell in love with a peasant girl. He loved her so much that he longed to be her husband and yet this seemed impossible to him. If he were to marry her and take her into his palace, the likelihood would be that she would feel unworthy or out of place by his side. Or that she might feel compelled out of fear of the king to love him. That she might always be aware of the one thing the king longed to forget, that he was a king and she a mere peasant, and that consequently she would forever remain unhappy. And since the king’s greatest desire was for the happiness of his beloved he couldn’t countenance causing her such pain. To elevate her by simply bringing her to his palace would have rendered her less happy than she would have been had she remained in obscurity, loved by an equal. The situation seemed impossible to him. How could he fulfil his desire to have this woman as his wife and, in so doing, to make her truly happy? The only solution of course, was for the king to put on the cloak of the beggar and go to the maiden and to woo her as an equal, in whose love she could be content.

God does not merely clothe himself in flesh as a deceit, to fool us into understanding him as our true friend, but becomes flesh and thereby make us his equals. The philosopher states that,


“…this is the unfathomable nature of love… [that it] desires equality with the beloved, not in jest, but in earnest and truth. And it is the omnipotence of the love which is so resolved that it is able to accomplish its purpose”  (Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 25)

That is the mystery at the heart of the Christian faith. God shows his love for us both in humbling himself and in raising us. He makes creatures his equals out of love for his creatures. What might it look like to live as people who are God’s friends?

I have two thoughts with which I conclude. First, to my clergy colleagues. If true love can only be shared between equals, between friends, can we ever truly love the congregation in which we minister if we see ourselves as the superior of the congregation? Can we love people who we might regard as our subordinates whose only task is to follow us? Jesus radically subverted these religious power games. He warned of those who “love to have the place of honour at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the market-places”. “But you”, Jesus says, “you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers and sisters. And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven. Nor are you to be called teachers, for you have one teacher, the Messiah” (Mat. 23. 6–10). The temptation to be the superior of a religious community is always there. But God shows his love for his people in calling them friends, not servants. Are we, then, to make servants of his friends?

The second thought is for everyone here, clergy and laity. We are, I take it, people who are concerned with ecumenism, with building bridges of love, commitment and co-operation between different congregations of the Church. But we have to ask ourselves whether we can even begin to start to love one another as God loves us if we entertain the thought that our church might be superior to the church down the road, the church of our brother or sister. As an Anglican, preaching in a United Reformed Church, I am painfully aware of the historic hurts which led, not only to our initial separation, but then to centuries of Anglican superciliousness towards their non-conformist brothers and sisters.  I can only be sorry for this history, and hope that today we can avoid the same attitudes which betray that we just haven’t understood how radical God’s love, his declaration of friendship, really is! But alas, these attitudes are not confined to history. They are very present, and if you hang around in church circles long enough you are sure to hear them. It could be an Anglican belittling the non-Episcopal ministry of a Presbyterian or Methodist minister. It could be an evangelical feeling superior to a liberal because they don’t have the ‘true gospel’. Or it could be a liberal feeling superior to an evangelical, thinking that they are just a bunch of deluded fundamentalists who have noisy worship. And that is to say nothing of Anglo-Catholics! I see my own part in this ecclesiastical snobbery: Disdainfully looking at another congregation, looking down my nose at them because they get something ‘wrong’. Again, these are God’s friends, should they not be mine too? And if my friends, then they are surely my equals, and I should respectfully learn from them. 

God the Son, who exists from all eternity, from whom all things come, for whom all things exist, who is worshipped by angels, calls us his friends. What might the church look like if we were to really start believing that!

John 20.19–31 – The Church of Locked Doors

Try to think for a moment of all the things which might attract you to a Church. Good music? Friendliness? A particular style of worship? Interesting sermons?  Well, whatever you think makes a church an attractive proposition, I doubt any of you think ‘locked doors’, ‘panic’, ‘fear’. Surely any church which had those characteristics wouldn’t last long? But it’s to exactly this kind of church that Jesus comes in this morning’s gospel reading. We find a group of disciples locked in a room, terrified, perhaps thinking that they might stand accused of stealing Jesus’ body, perhaps fearing that they might very soon, quite literally have to follow their master in taking up their cross. This didn’t look like the kind of church that was going to set the world on fire.

But it’s into the midst of this frightened group that Jesus appears. The locked doors aren’t able to keep him out. And so there he is. How would the already terrified disciples feel? Perhaps they are a bit nervous about what Jesus would say to them. They’d already deserted Jesus when he was being tried and crucified. Now, even after Mary had told them that she had seen Jesus risen from the tomb, they aren’t rejoicing, but trembling. Into this trembling crowd Jesus doesn’t breath a word of condemnation, but says ‘peace be with you’. The peace Jesus speaks about here means much more than ‘don’t be afraid, don’t stress out’. Jesus pronounces the peace and forgiveness and the restoration of all things which God’s kingdom brings. The trembling church becomes the forgiven church. It also becomes the church which has its doubts addressed – Jesus shows them his wounds. And it also becomes the commissioned and gifted church – Jesus sends the church as the Father sent him and breathes the Holy Spirit into them so that the mission of God can be fulfilled. This church had absolutely nothing going for it, except that this was a church which Jesus had broken into and had chosen to be present with.

The church of locked doors – Maybe our doors aren’t physically shut and locked, but have we shut the doors in other ways? Are there ways in which we not only try to shut out a world which we feel is terrifying and hostile, but also, perhaps, try to shut out Jesus, who we feel ashamed of having let down? The church in the twenty-first century, including our congregation, looks in many ways a lot like the church of locked doors. What on earth has a church like this got going for it? Well, everything and nothing. Nothing, because, in truth, left to ourselves, we have very little to offer, and a huge task to do. Everything, because we are not left to ourselves. Perhaps the timid, cowering church is the closest thing to being a real church as we can ever get, because when we know how little we have to offer, we know that what we do offer genuinely comes from God.

There are lots of interesting things in this story, and lots of questions to ask. The real surprise for me, which I don’t think we often pick up on because we’re so obsessed with ‘Doubting Thomas’, is that the disciples only a week after Jesus had appeared to them, given them peace and pardon, breathed the Holy Spirit over them and commissioned them to take the good news to the word, are back in a locked room! And into this locked room Jesus comes again, and pronounces peace again, and addresses the disciples’ doubts again. When the disciples’ are afraid, Jesus grace increases. Jesus keeps returning to us, he keeps giving, that’s just the kind of God he is. There is nothing that we do which can ultimately shut him out.

But even though the doors we lock ourselves behind aren’t a barrier to Jesus coming to us, he doesn’t want us to stay locked up. He doesn’t even want us to just open the doors. He wants us to leave the building: “ As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Jesus’ gift to us, his Spirit, is primarily given so that we can share the good news of Jesus with others. It’s impossible to talk about spirituality without talking about mission. This isn’t trendy modern CofE, here are some words from William Temple, one time Archbishop of Canterbury:

         “We must not expect the gift while we ignore the purpose. A Church which ceases to be             

           missionary will not be, and cannot rightly expect to be “Spiritual”.”  

           (Temple, Readings in St John’s Gospel, 386)

To move beyond being the church of the locked doors, to be able to do any good in the world, the earliest Christians needed Jesus with them. Jesus was with them breaking down the doors they had shut themselves behind, beckoning them outside, letting them know that they were loved and forgiven and that God had big plans for them, helping them to realise that it was God’s work they were engaged in and not theirs. The same is true for every Christian in every generation.

John 20.11–18 - Hearing Jesus Call Us

It can be hard to be all that enthusiastic about the joyful news of Easter when you’re very used to the story. Some of you might have been here for the first Eucharist of Easter last night when we welcomed the risen Lord. For others, Easter might have come around all too soon. “The Lord is Risen! He’s risen indeed… again…”. If you don’t feel that way right now, I guarantee that in seven weeks time, when we are still greeting each other with “Christ is risen!” you will. Well, for the Easter weary, the Gospel of John is just for you.

There is no suspense in John’s story of the first resurrection encounter. As we read it, we don’t have to try to pretend that we don’t know how the story is going to work out. The power of John’s story about Jesus’ encounter with Mary Magdalene is in the lack of suspense. We know that Jesus is risen. We know that Jesus is the gardener. Generally, when John looks at the resurrection, he looks at it from the perspective of how people respond to encountering the risen Jesus. So the power of the story we read this morning doesn’t come from our gradually realising the awesome reality of the resurrection, but by seeing what it is that leads to Mary recognising Jesus and how she responds to him. 

Mary recognised Jesus when he spoke her name. He spoke into the finest details of her life, to the roots of her identity. He knows her, calls her by name and immediately the scales fall from her eyes. “Rabounni”, “my teacher” she calls out. I am sure that, on some level, the same is true for every Christian. God calls our name in some deeply personal way and we know that we are his beloved children. True Christian faith is more than just peace when enjoying the beauty of a church or a sunset, it is more than feeling lifted by evensong or by gazing at an icon. True Christian faith is more than just a feeling of peace found when praying. It is certainly more than just intellectually believing the right things. True Christian faith is hearing in and through these things, and many other things besides, the voice of Jesus calling us by name. 

Some of you might know that my greatest theological hero is thirteenth-century priest called Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas wrote some of the most breathtaking theology the world has ever known.   His work was breathtaking not only in its complexity and brilliance but in its magnitude! His longest work was the Summa Theologiæ, and it’s massive. Aquinas never finished the Summa. And this is the story of how he came to stop writing. On St Nicolas’ day 1273, Aquinas was presiding at the Eucharist and heard Jesus speaking to him, from a Crucifix. Jesus asked Aquinas if there was anything he wanted. Aquinas answered, “Only you Lord, only you.” And from that moment he never wrote again, he wouldn’t finish the Summa, nothing. All this was much to the annoyance of his assistant Reginald of Piperno, who asked why Aquinas wouldn’t finish his work. Aquinas replied “Reginald, I cannot, because all that I have written seems like straw to me.” Three months later at the age of 49, Aquinas died. He’s called a doctor of the church. I like to think that its not because of the theology he wrote, as marvelous as it is, but because he came to realise that words on a page can never be a substitute for hearing Jesus call your name.

This really is the first question we need to ask in response to the story of Mary Magdalene hearing and seeing Jesus: how do we here him calling our name? Do we hear him calling our name? It doesn’t matter whether you hear your name being called through liturgy, or through incense or through the beauty of creation or other people or breathtaking theology or whatever, the important thing is that you hear it.

But in this wonderful story we don’t just see what leads Mary to recognise Jesus, we see how Jesus responds to her reaction. It seems as though Mary probably fell at Jesus’ feet and embraced them (Mt. 28.9). She was so overwhelmed with seeing him that all she could think of doing was holding his feet.  At this point though, Jesus says something strange, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father.” Jesus is in the process of ascending to his Father in heaven, so Mary’s relationship with Jesus is going to have to change because there’s going to be a time when she won’t be able to see him, or hear him, or touch him. Instead, Mary is given a job to do. She has to go and preach the good news of the resurrection to Jesus’ disciples. Mary Magdalene, the first Christian preacher of the good news of the resurrection.

As important as it is to hear Jesus voice calling our name in some way, it’s equally important that we learn to grow from that experience. Mary heard Jesus calling her name, but the calling went much deeper. It was a call on her entire life. A call to testify to the resurrection of Jesus. A vocation. Are we tempted to hold onto Jesus? It might be that we are content with coming to church, or praying, or reading the Bible because it helps us know that we are God’s beloved children, and that’s great. But sooner or later Jesus is going to say to us, “don’t cling onto me… go… share”. The message of Easter to Mary Magdalene whilst it was personal, wasn’t individualistic. It was personal but it wasn’t to stay personal, it was a message to be shared. And if we are going to be people who follow Mary, we’ll follow her in sharing the good news of the resurrection.

Peterson again...

Some more great (and sometimes acerbic) thoughts on prayer from Eugene Peterson:

"John Calvin frequently referred to the world around us as a "theatre of God's glory." We write of the creator's dazzling performance in putting together the elements of matter and arranging the components of the cosmos. Everything is created. Everything carries within its form and texture  the signature of its creator.  No part of this material world is unconnected with God; every cell is in the organism of salvation. Biblical religion cannot be lived apart from matter - the seen, felt, tasted, smelled, and listened to creation... creation is our place for meeting God and conversing with him." (Peterson, Answering God, 71)

Disassociated from creation, prayer drifts into silly sentimentalism, or snobbish mysticism, or pious elitism. The intent of prayer is not to  to refine our course materiality into pure sprit so that we will not embarrass heaven with the vulgarities of flesh. We are not angels nor are we to become angels. The word did not become a good idea, or  a numinous feeling or a moral aspiration: the word became flesh." (72)

"Significantly, while the Psalmists called God a rock, they never set up a rock and called it God... An idol reduces and confines; a metaphor expands and connects." (77-78)

"The rubric for apophatic prayer is "fold your hands, bow your head, shut your eyes and we'll pray'. But the Psalmists are katophatic to a man, to a woman  -  they take us to the theatre where we see "mountains skip like rams" (Ps. 114.4) and hear "trees clap their hands" (Isa. 55.12); they show us how to pray with our eyes open, wide open." (79-80)

"There is a pseudo-prayer that promises its practitioners entrance into the subliminal harmonies of the of the way-things-are, putting them in tune with the general hum of the universe. This so called prayer reduces tension, lowers stress and extends longevity. The people who get good at it are calm, their voices soothing, their actions poised. They meditate on beautiful thoughts and sleep well. Psalm prayer  also enters into the-way-things-are, but finds that the-way-things-are is pretty bad. Evil is encountered. Wickedness is confronted. This prayer quickens the pulse and shoots adrenalin into the bloodstream. The people who practice this prayer get excited - they yell and gesture. They are engaged, or soon to be engaged, in an act of war. Prayer is combat." (96)

"There is hardly a page of the Psalms that isn't left smoking with a pungent curse." (101)


"Not every prayer is capped off with praise. In fact most prayers, if the Psalter is a true guide, are not. But prayer , a praying life, finally becomes praise. Prayer is always reaching upwards towards praise and will finally arrive there... The end of prayer, all prayer, is praise. Our lives fill out in goodness; earth and heaven meet in an extraordinary conjunction. Clashing cymbals announce the glory: Blessing. Amen. Hallelujah." (127-128)

And  finally for a little Karl Barth on praying for God's name to be hallowed:

""Hallowed be thy name" that means: may it  be given to us and to the world, to this world which is neither worse nor better than we are, in the midst of which we creatures have the advantage of knowing thee, of being called to thy service - may it be given to us to make use of thine incomparable offer; may it not be in vain  that thou hast spoken to us in thy Son; may thy church know how to put its existence to work; may it be liberated from... fear and faintheartedness, from the spirit of pride, from flippancy. May we stop leafing through the Bible instead of reading it. May we moderate a little out habit of of quoting the bible instead of living with it and letting it speak. May we pray that the Bible will not cease holding our attention. May the Bible not begin to make us yawn, and thy word, in all its parts, not become a boring matter in our minds and in our mouths; May it not become a bad sermon, a bad catechism, a bad theology." (Karl Barth, Prayer, 33-34)

"Theological Reflection" and Prayer

As part of my ongoing training I have to complete a portfolio of evidence which demonstrates that I have met a set of ministerial competencies – I guess this is a task which lots of people have encountered in their work, particularly in the early days of a new career. It is probably a little different for ministers as so many of the ‘competencies’ are intangible and, therefore, difficult to provide evidence for. So far it has mainly been letters of thanks, a service plan, a sermon. The usual sort of thing. However, we have been told that we need to include more ‘theological reflection’ in our portfolios. After receiving this advice I began to realise two things. First, I did no formal theological reflection in my training course (unlike many of my peers). I don’t know whether to feel privileged or disappointed by this. Privileged, I think. The second thing is that almost all ‘theological reflections’ I have read have been very reflective, but not at all theological (I am willing to be corrected on this if people have examples to share with me). Anyway, this got me thinking about whether I already do theological reflection, but in a less formal way than Anglican Theological Colleges teach. I was also thinking this at the same time as writing a sermon on Praying with the Bible. It made me wonder whether formal ‘theological reflection’ is straining towards (though not quite arriving at) the life of prayer which we see in the Psalms. If anyone reads this, I’d be interested in your thoughts.

The Bible Roots our praying

Throughout his life, Jesus carried with him, admittedly not in book form, the words God had spoken to his people. He also carried with him a desire to respond to those words. It seems to me that for a Christian, this is the first and most basic definition of prayer: answering the God who speaks to us. So prayer and the Bible must be intimately related. Prayer isn’t our quest for an unknown God; prayer is our answer to a God who has made himself known, through his people, Israel, trough the Bible, and most significantly in Jesus Christ. This understanding of prayer strains against a lot of what we hear about prayer today – for many people, prayer is the way we journey into the secret mysteries of the universe, the way we conduct our search for the meaning of life. If you go and look on the spirituality shelves of Waterstones, the message you get is that when it comes to matters of the soul, the initiative rests firmly with us. But the Bible paints a different picture. God’s word precedes our word. We don’t seek God; God seeks us. He is the the Father who looks for and runs to the prodigal son. He is the shepherd who searches for one lost sheep which probably doesn’t know that it is lost. All of life, including the spiritual life, starts with God, with his seeking us, with his speaking to us. 

Praying with the Bible means first and foremost that we have to root our praying in God’s word to us. In prayer we answer the God who addresses us, and so prayer always starts with listening carefully to God. To be a Biblical prayer, we have to allow our praying to be deeply rooted in what God has said to us in Scripture and in Jesus Christ. Our prayers, in other words, shouldn’t be cut flowers, but rooted plants. Cut flowers are beautiful to look at. They have brilliant and rich colour and texture, for a little while,  but they have no life in them. They aren’t nourished in the way flowers ought to be nourished, by drawing goodness from the soil. And the same is true of our prayers, without being rooted in God’s word to us, they might be beautiful for a little while, but eventually our praying will wither for lack of nutrition.

The Bible Forms our Praying

We are often surprised by the God who has come looking for us. He doesn’t look much like the supreme being you read about in the pages of the spirituality best sellers. How on earth are we supposed to respond to the God of the Bible? The Bible helps us here also, because in it is a collection prayers which practice this rootedness in God’s word to us, the Psalms. The psalms listen for God’s word. The Psalms start by extolling the virtues of the person who delights in God’s law, and meditates on it day and night, comparing such a person to a ‘tree planted by streams of water, which yields fruit in season, and whose leaf does not wither’ (Ps. 1.3). The psalms are the prayers of people who rooted themselves in God’s word, who meditated on God’s covenant, and from that foundation, they answer back to God. By praying the Psalms, by allowing them to sink into our hearts, we too can learn to pray.

However, the Psalms don’t teach a method, or a formula of prayer. Some of the time, we might wish prayer was like that – follow these instructions and you will be a real prayer. But praying isn’t like that. It isn’t like learning to ride a bike. The Psalms aren’t much interested in methods of prayer. They are more interested in prayer being the expression of a deep relationship of love and trust. The Psalms are real. They answer God from the realities of life as it is, not as we think it should be. They were prayed by real people with real joys and real problems; real faith and real sins, and they reflect real life in all its complexity. In them you find all joys of life going perfectly according to plan, and all despair of life in the doldrums. 


In the Psalms we find people praying to God in an amasingly frank way. Israel can cry from the depths of despair, “ My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?  Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest” (Psalm 22.1–2), and Israel can sing for joy “Lord, our God, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory in the heavens” (Psalm 8.1). Israel can invoke God to flex his muscles, “Rise up, O God, and defend your cause; remember how fools mock you all day long. Do not ignore the clamor of your adversaries, the uproar of your enemies, which rises continually” (Psalm 74.22–23).

The Psalms aren’t abstract, they speak from the messiness of life, its joy and its pain. Its hallelujahs and its hatreds. True prayer happens when you hit your thumb with a hammer as much as it does when you gaze on a sunset. True prayer sets all of life’s experiences in the context of God and what he has said to us. And because of this, real prayer is risky. It means making yourself vulnerable before God, confessing weakness and sin, pouring our troubles and concerns out to him, allowing the feelings we would rather burry and forget about to be expressed to God. But it also means making God vulnerable before us, because it means holding God to his promises to us. It means asking him to be the kind of God he has proclaimed himself to be. The Psalms allow God to break out of the religious box we keep him in, domesticated, for Sundays and other special occasions, and allows an honest relationship to develop. In praying with the psalms, we are invited and assisted into this relationship. To paraphrase one author, if you are looking for a spiritual soporific, don’t look to the psalms! (Eugene Peterson, Answering God, p. 96)

Finally two practical thoughts about praying with the Psalms:

– The ‘daily office’ is a good place to start, because you get a regular diet of psalms, might not be such a good place to finish. Allowing the Psalms to form our prayer means we have to slow down, something which is not easy to do at Evensong! Sometimes the routine never lets the psalms sink in and do their work. How can we move ourselves from simply prattling the psalms to praying with and through them? When I was training I had the great privilege of studying for a few months in Rome. The first week I was in Italy we went on retreat. I remember sitting in a dining hall and seeing inscribed above the door an interesting motto: Mangiare Largo. Masticare Bene. Eat slowly. Chew well. We will need to find ways in which we can eat the Psalms slowly and chew them well, and my guess is that for most of us, it is probably not going to be in context of a church service.

– Don’t feel afraid of the negative stuff in the Psalms. Remember that they are real, and real life is full of negatives as well as positives. The Psalms pray about enemies, and sometimes, there are enemies we have to fight too. The Psalm writers often pray their disappointment and hatred, because these were things they genuinely were feeling. They weren’t squeamish. Mature praying places our actual lives in Gods presence, and calls upon his promise to transform and save.